Sankai Juku

Stylised, symbolic and distilled, this Japanese company's pieces are the dance equivalent of haikus. Only, you know, much longer.

In short

Stylised, symbolic and distilled, this Japanese company’s pieces are the dance equivalent of haikus. Only, you know, much longer.

Backstory

Ushio Amagatsu founded his all-male company Sankai Juku in 1975. Born in 1949, he had already studied classical and modern dance, but his real passion was a newly emerged Japanese style called butoh. More a philosophy of movement than a dance style as such, butoh had grown from the experimental Japanese performances of the 1960s, and was influenced by German expressionist dance and French surrealist theatre (particularly Artaud), as well as Japanese forms such as kabuki.

Following their first world tour in 1980, Sankai Juku quickly became a fixture on the international circuit, going down particularly well in France, where the company took up residence. In 1985, tragedy struck: a rope snapped during an outdoor performance in Seattle in which the dancers were lowered upside down from a rooftop; one man, Yoshiyuki Takada, died. The rest of the tour was cancelled.

Sankai Juku nevertheless continued to flourish, and remain the world’s best-known butoh troupe.

Watching Sankai Juku

With its shaven-headed dancers, white-powdered bodies, eerie slow motion, contorted shapes and gaping mouths, butoh is sometimes seen as a visceral response to the horrors of Hiroshima. In other words, it’s the dance equivalent of Godzilla.

Sankai Juku certainly has its ancestry in this “dance of darkness”, but Amagatsu has developed a “second-generation” style of butoh – gentler, less bleak, its focus more on mysticism and stage imagery. A typical piece uses slowness and repetition to induce transcendental or meditative states. Their set designs are always stunning.

Who’s who

Ushio Amagatsu is the founder and artistic director. Most of Sankai Juku’s works have been commissioned by the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.

Fact

During one Washington performance of Kinkan Shonen, the live peacock that features in the piece flew up from the stage to perch on a balcony. It was doubtless symbolic of something. With Sankai Juku, everything is.

In their own words

“There is no way that one can understand the nature of light if one never observes deeply the darkness.” – Amagatsu, interview with Nadine Meisner, Independent 2001